The Talibanization of IraqUnder mounting repression, courageous women fight for their rights and their lives. Is this how the U.S. brought "freedom" to the country?

by Bay Fang

Yanar Mohammed returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime because she thought the veil of tyranny had finally been lifted from her native country. She and two other women started the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), with the goal of fighting for women’s rights.

But since those days, her OWFI cofounders have fled the country, and Mohammed herself has received numerousdeath threats for her work. OWFI , one of the few remaining nongovernmental organizations left in Iraq, has been forced to operate in complete secrecy.

“Because of the chaos on the streets and in the government,
women have been forced to leave work and hide at
home,” says Mohammed, 47. “We live in a state of continuous fear—if our hair shows on the street, if we’re not veiled enough at work,” says Mohammed. “It’s a new experience for women in Iraq. After four years, it’s turned into Afghanistan under the Taliban.”

Throughout much of recent history, Iraq was one of the
most progressive countries in the Middle East for women.
Saddam Hussein and his Baath party encouraged women
to go to school and enter the workforce. The constitution
drafted in 1970 guaranteed women the right to vote, attend
school, own property and run for political office.

The 1959 Law of Personal Status—which came into being
thanks to a mobilization by Iraqi women after the end of
British colonial rule—gave women equal rights to divorce,
restricted polygamy, prohibited marriages under age 18
and ensured that men and women had the same inheritance
rights.

These rights diminished somewhat after the 1991 Gulf
War, partly because of Saddam Hussein’s new embrace of
Islamic tribal law as a way of consolidating power, and partly due to the United Nations’ sanctions against the
regime. After the sanctions were imposed, Human Rights
Watch reports, the gender gap in school enrollment in-creased
dramatically, as did female illiteracy (because,
when faced with limited financial resources, many families
chose to keep their girls home). According to the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), in 1987 approximately 75 percent of
Iraqi women were literate; by the end of 2000 that percentage
had dropped to less than 25 percent.

Still, as bad as it was during Saddam’s time, women’s
well-being and security have sharply deteriorated since the
fall of his regime. Violence against women, both at home
and on the streets, has spiked, as women are less protected
legally and institutionally and standards of living have gone
down. From 2003 to 2005, says Mohammed, she could
meet with groups of 200 or 300 women at factories or the
railway station. “But this year is completely different. A
woman can’t even walk two to three blocks safely, much
less [come to] a meeting.”

Furthermore, extremists in both Sunni and Shiite areas
have taken over pockets of the country and imposed their
own Taliban-like laws on the population, requiring
women to wear full-length veils, segregating the sexes in
public and forbidding such activities as singing and dancing.
Hair salons are bombed, and many have gone under-ground.
Women college students are stopped and harassed on campuses, so going to school is a risk. “I don’t
have one woman friend who has not been harassed, or
worse, on the street,” says Mohammed. Women who
work for OWFI are routinely threatened with beatings or
rape if they aren’t completely veiled. Islamist “misery
gangs” regularly patrol the streets in many areas, beating
and harassing women who are not “properly” dressed or
behaved.

Zainab Salbi also grew up in Iraq, experiencing first-hand
the oppression of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial
regime as the daughter of Saddam’s pilot. When Hussein
was toppled, she too began traveling back to Iraq to work
for women’s rights. But when she compares the situation
there today to how it was in her childhood, she says that
now it is definitively worse.

“The violence during Saddam’s time was … committed
by the government, Saddam’s family, people in power.
Now the violence is … being committed by everyone
around you,” says Salbi, who founded the group Women
for Women International in 1993. That organization now
operates in nine countries to help women survivors of war
and civil strife rebuild their lives; Iraq, says Salbi, is in the
worst shape of them all.

Today, most of her friends have left Iraq. There are only
a handful of organizations left in the country. Women for
Women International has to keep its locations secret and
take all sorts of security precautions. Unlike other countries
in which the group operates, in Iraq it’s responsible
not only for helping needy women but also keeping its
own staff alive.

Salbi herself stopped traveling back to her homeland
two years ago because of the spike in targeted assassinations
of professional women. “At first I was able to say I
knew 10, 20 women who had been assassinated,” she says.
“Now, I’ve lost count. … They are pharmacists, professors,
reporters, activists…”

The Human Rights Office of the U.N. Mission in Iraq
has received reports of young women being abducted by
armed sectarian militias and found days later sexually
abused, tortured and murdered. It has also charted an increase
in kidnapping and killing of women: “In late December,
three female students from Mustansiriya
University were reportedly kidnapped by Shiite militias,”
the report reads. “Despite the payment of a ransom, their
bodies were found at the morgue on December 22 bearing
signs of rape and torture. Official sources denied the incident
but students from the University confirmed it did
take place.”

Many of the bodies of women and girls who are raped and
killed are not getting claimed, because families are too fearful
or ashamed to identify them. One day at the Baghdad
morgue last November, OWFI activists were told that
more than 150 unclaimed women’s bodies had moved
through over the previous 10 days, many of which were
beheaded, disfigured or showed signs of torture.

“Often, the first salvo in a war for theocracy is a systematic
attack on women and minorities who represent or demand
an alternative or competing vision for society,”
wrote Yifat Susskind, communications coordinator of the
international human and women’s-rights organization
MADRE, in a report she authored on “gender apartheid”
in Iraq. “These initial targets are usually the most marginalized
and, therefore, most vulnerable members of society,
and once they are dealt with, fundamentalist forces
then proceed towards less vulnerable targets.”

Beyond negotiating their personal safety, women in
the new Iraq are worried about whether fundamentalist
forces will succeed in curtailing their legal freedoms.
The new Iraqi constitution makes citizens “equal
before the law without discrimination based on gender,”
yet the document also states that no law “that contradicts
the established provisions of Islam may be established.”
But which version of Islam will prevail in the country’s
new legal system?

During Saddam’s rule, the national personal status law
governed such things as age of marriage, inheritance, divorce
and custody of children. Women were able to settle suits in civil courts. Now, such law is the domain of religious
courts, and judges and imams are free to make their
own individual interpretations. In some parts of Baghdad,
like the Shiite slum of Sadr City, religious courts following
strict interpretations of sharia law have become the de
facto authority in place of government courts. “We used
to have a government that was almost secular. It had one
dictator,” says Yanar Mohammed. “Now we have almost
60 dictators—Islamists who think of women as forces of
evil. This is what is called the democratization of Iraq.”

During the January 2005 elections for the National
Assembly, political parties were required to field electoral
slates on which every third candidate was a woman, and as
a result women captured 31 percent of the seats. But nearly
half of the elected women parliamentarians ran on the
list of the Shiite alliance, and they have had to toe the conservative
line of their party. Some of the women parliamentarians
could be forces for moderation and progress—
such as Mayson al-Damluji, a former undersecretary of
culture who has urged the prime minister to honor his
pledge to improve women’s rights—but the dangerous political
environment of targeted assassinations has prevented
them from being very outspoken.

Increased violence against women in the streets has had
a parallel effect on the increase in domestic violence, including
“honor” killings. With the destruction of the former
Iraqi state, and the rise in the power of Islamists and
conservative tribal authorities, lethal responses against
women who are raped—and thus considered to have
shamed their families—have become more common.

Also, in a situation that may be akin to honor killings, it
was reported in December 2006 by the United Nations
Assistance Mission for Iraq that in the Kurdish-governed
north, 239 women burned themselves in the first eight
months of 2006. A hospital source in the northeast city of
Sulaimaniya suspected that such cases are underreported
because of fear of the social stigma, shame and culpable
involvement of family members associated with honor
crimes. Most cases have been investigated as “accidents”
or “suicide attempts.”

In response to the rise in honor killings and other domestic
violence, OWFI has set up women’s shelters in
four cities around the country. If the shelters cannot protect
a woman, an “underground railroad” network helps
her escape the country, along with providing money and
support to help her set up a new life.

For those remaining in Iraq, a recent survey by the
United Nations Development Programme shows one-third
live in poverty and 5 percent in extreme poverty—a
sharp deterioration from before the 2003 invasion. Half
the population is lacking in the supply of clean water, and
more than 40 percent have inadequate sanitation. The
price of certain essentials, like kerosene used for cooking,
has shot up, in some cases from $1 per unit four years ago
to $40 per unit today.

Such poverty has a harsh impact on women, as does the
fact that very few jobs are available. Women generally
have a harder time finding work in Iraq, and after years of
war there are an estimated half million widows in the
country, according to OWFI. The U.N. reports that the
international community has not done enough to help:
“Projects created to provide jobs for women were abandoned
after the exodus of international NGOs from [Iraq
in] October 2005. There is an urgent need for the international
community to ensure projects aimed at job creation,
especially for women, who now face a long struggle
surviving and bringing up families on their own.”

The few women activists who are still in Iraq feel that
time is running out for them and their work. “Women are
a bellwether for the direction of a society. Both violence
and progress often start with women,” says Salbi. “A classic
example was with the Taliban—they started with violence
against women, and everyone looked the other way… but eventually everyone suffered. We need to take
this moment to raise the world’s attention. Iraqi women
are holding up, but they can’t hold it on their own—they
need us to help.”

Bay Fang is a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who
has been based in both China and Iraq.